LiveLongAgeWell

A main goal of this blog is to give you practical hints so you can live healthier and longer, but just as important is to give you information so you can live happier. There doesn’t seem to be too much point trying to live a super-long life if you aren’t reasonably happy. Now especially during these tough economic times, when I find information on ways you can increase your level of happiness, I will pass it along…

Earlier this year (before I started this LLAW blog), two reputable research reports appeared regarding, first, how quitting smoking, and then how obesity could be “contagious”. Yes, a team of researchers—from Harvard and UC San Diego—concluded that you are significantly more likely to lose or gain weight or quit smoking if you become aware of friends or relatives who recently lost or gained weight, or quit smoking, even if they live across the country. Just knowing about others who have changed in these ways seems to profoundly influence your own behavior. The influence of your friends spreads almost like a social virus, in a seemingly contagious manner.

Just last week the same researchers showed a similar type of effect with happiness: if you become aware of friends or even neighbors (who aren’t friends but just acquaintances), then YOU are more likely to also become happier. The effect is greater if these people actually are your friends, and the closer they live to you the greater the effect. There seems to be a larger effect from people your own gender who become happy. More surprising is that they found even “third degree” friends had some influence on your own happiness, meaning if a friend of one of your friend’s friends switched to becoming happy for some reason, then their happiness in a small way rubbed off onto you. If true, this truly speaks of an amazing strength of social networks.

When these researchers earlier this year released their studies on contagious obesity and smoking behavior, other scientists seemed to be surprised, but generally supportive that it all made sense. But this current study on happiness—even though it came from good institutions—has raised more skepticism.  Some have said that perhaps there is something in the statistical analysis that has lead to erroneous conclusions, particularly since they concluded that if your next-door friend suddenly became happy, that the effect on you was greater than if your own spouse became happy.

I suspect it will take a couple years for the various social scientists to argue all this out. Typically what happens when a study is controversial is that either another group of scientists will be able to repeat the first study and confirm the findings, or will conclude with their new research that the first study was wrong, or only partially right.

In the meantime however, we might take the conclusions of this happiness study at face value, and to maximize our own happiness, try to form bonds with people, or at least become aware of others who are doing positive things with their lives. It just might just rub off on us.